Dec 14, 2007
How do you go about creating a game for one of the most important science-fiction TV shows since Star Trek: The Next Generation? Why, you resurrect the ghost of Wing Commander of course - hiring the voice talent of the series before casting the player as a new recruit under the stern tuition of Starbuck - then having the player dogfight their way through the space-bullet-ridden battles seen in the first seasons of the updated Battlestar Galactica.
Then you have FPS sections for Caprica-based action, and when a ship gets boarded. Then, for multiplayer fun, you have Cylon base star vs. Battlestar Pegasus bouts, with tons of player-controlled units flying around everywhere. And ooh! How about a deathmatch mode in the stylings of The Ship, when no one knows who the sneaky Cylon agent is?
That was fun wasn’t it? Thinking about an imaginary game like that. Now lets look at what real people actually did to ruin the most intelligent, astute and relevant sci-fi franchise that’s ever drawn breath: They turn it into a game where space is two-dimensional; where you might as well be flying the ship from Asteroids after it flunked its physics exam; and where Vipers have a stupid purple force field that is definitely not canon.
So basically you pilot top-down ships from the show, shooting top-down Cylon raiders with guns and missiles in a rough approximation of what happens in dogfights during the TV series - and you can turn around quickly, and roll from side to side (not up and down). And that’s pretty much it. You zip around grids filled with meteors and gas clouds, gently nuzzling the edges of bizarrely restricted space, getting killed and respawning again and again. To call playing this a drudge would be insulting to other menial, thankless tasks.
